The Blindboy Podcast
Hosted by Blindboy Boatclub
Original podcast
Martin Shaw is a writer, mythographer and Christian thinker. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.
16,605 words · 7 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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Upend your swelling, pen pals, you transcendent enders. Welcome to the Blind White Podcast. If this is your first episode, please consider going back to an earlier episode to familiarize yourself with the lore of this podcast. You can hear the gentle pitter-patter of rain again this week.
That's the rain hitting off the roof of my office. January, February, and March. That's the real winter.
Like, we say that winter is
November, October, December. And it's true, it's dark, it's cold, it's navy, but it's a dry, frosty cold. And it's stunning, it's very beautiful. But now, this is that country stuff.
When it's January, February and March, that's when, that's when the weather tries to have a fight with you. That's when the weather is, when the weather has a problem with you.
Out there right now, it's freezing and greasy and aggressive. The rain is sideways and fat. And it's backed up by a bitter wind. It's difficult to find meaning in, in, in that weather because it won't let me. It won't let me. It wants to get into my eyes. It's horizontal rain. It really wants to penetrate my bones. So this is the real winter right now. And I don't enjoy this particular weather. Cycling in this, the horizontal freezing rain that hurts my face, that reddens my skin. I want it to end. Now, I know it's gonna end
because that's how seasons work. But you know that I adore mythology and folklore.
And I don't just adore mythology and folklore because these are interesting stories. It's more than that. Often you'll find with mythology and folklore, it informs you about your environment, about biodiversity. Indigenous stories of the land. Mythology is, it's like the fruiting body of the, the consciousness of humans that are on the land right now. And what I love about that is it's, it's not nationalistic. So for Irish mythology, you don't have to be Irish. You just have to be a person that's on the land of Ireland right now. And those stories grew up from the land. And I'm a writer. I'm obsessed with the art form of
writing. Whether it's words that I write with my hand that you read with your eyes on a page, or here on this podcast, or it's words that I write with my mouth that you read with your ears. Mythology, stories that existed before the written word. They had to be held in the land. A tree becomes a book. A mountain and a river becomes a book. I'm obsessed with that. So in times like this, so first off, that, that rain that you hear, that's not natural. Okay?
We're experiencing Storm Chandra right now. And in the past, I think 15 years, this has become the stormy season. There's more rainfall than there used to be 30 years ago. They're stronger, there's more extreme weather as a result of climate change. That's what's happening now. And we're the first generation to experience this. And I'm always trying to test the mythology and the stories that are thousands of years old against the weather that's occurring right now. So this morning, for instance, I cycled along the river, the Shannon River. I cycled into a very aggressive, shimmery silver curtain
of sideways rain, razor rain blasting into my eyes. And wind, wind that didn't want me to cycle. But in the chaos of all that, I looked through the veil, that silvery veil of fucking, of rain. And in the Shannon, in the Shannon River, which was brown, brown with all the mud that had been washed down the country from the storm. In the Shannon River, I saw three cormorants bobbing underneath the water. And I noticed, ah, those are the first cormorants I've seen this year. I haven't seen those cormorants since about last summer. Wow, isn't that lovely? Now, those cormorants are, they're part of the ecosystem.
They're indigenous to that river. Now, why are those cormorants dipping underneath the water right now? Well, that tells me about the salmon. I know that the salmon are returning from the Atlantic Ocean. And now they're swimming upstream to lay their eggs. And that's what the cormorants are doing. The cormorants are out going, excellent, the salmon are returning and we're going to eat them. And that's, that's the ecosystem working as it should. And then it tells me, me, the animal, the human being, I'm an animal. And I exist in the ecosystem too. And I can use my advanced brain that can construct meaning and that has language and that can tell stories and communicate these stories to other people.
I can look at the behaviour of those cormorants, know that that's telling me about the salmon, and then go, brilliant, spring is upon us. This sideways rain that's reddening my face, it's going to be over soon because spring is upon us. And then I can go further than that and I can consult the mythology. In Irish mythology, so the Cymru's name in Irish is an Cailach Dove. The black hag. But what is the Cailach in Irish mythology? The Cailach is the goddess of winter, the hag. The hag, the Cailach, is portrayed as an older woman, a hag, who's angry and she strips the land bare.
And that's what winter is, that's the goddess of winter. And the mythology says, she made her first appearance there in October. Samhain, Halloween night. She emerged from Onigat Cave. When the veil between our world and the other world was thin, she emerged from the cave and stripped the land bare. Brought about winter and she's been having crack since then. And the Cymru is called the Cailach. So that's wonderful. I've now looked at the river, seen the Cymru's emerge and now consulted the mythology. And this Sunday, which is the first of fucking February, that's Saint Bridget's Day. But before Saint Bridget, there was the goddess Bridget.
And Bridget is like the goddess of light, the goddess of summer. And in Irish myth, the Cailach, the hag, the winter goddess, hands power over to Bridget around February 1st. And Bridget brings with her fertility, noonless. Green grass, blue skies, sunlight. Saint Bridget's Day is the pre-Christian festival of Imbolc. And Ilboc, Imbolc means in the belly. February 1st, summer is in the womb, getting ready to be born. And it goes like that in a cycle forever and ever. And you use cues from the environment and stories to remind you of that.
And after this storm is over, this Sunday, let's just say Bridget's Day, when this storm has passed,
if I see a Cymru.
On the banks of a river, stretching its wings out, or else collecting sticks. But the old stories tell me, like, here's the thing with Irish myths, so she's, she's shape shifting. She exists outside of time, in the other world, through the veil. So in my reality, what I'm looking at is a cormorant, but in the other shimmer of the other world, it's the hag, it's the chailock. So if the cormorant is stretching its wings or collecting sticks after the storm this Sunday, then that means that the chailock is going, "I'm collecting sticks for my fire", and that means she's doing a Donald Trump on it. She's not ready to transition to power.
She's not gonna hand power over to Bridget just yet, she's trying to hang on to winter. She's having a little January 6th insurrection. She's gonna hold on to it for another few weeks, and that winter's gonna last a little bit longer. And if that sounds familiar, if that sounds to you like the, the American tradition of Groundhog Day, it's because that's where it comes from. Groundhog Day comes from Irish immigrants who, who went over to America and had the story of the chailock, the cormorant. And that there is the, the beauty and importance of mythology. They're not just stories, it's about how the human animal, it's about how we understand biodiversity, and also how
we fear and respect nature. Capitalism strips us from that. It alienates us from the stories and from our relationship with biodiversity. I'll give you a classic fucking example. Like, I'm going around the river looking for cormorants and relating it back to the chailock, because that's the shit that I'm into. If I walked up to anyone in Limerick City and said, "Did you see the cormorants in the river? You know what that means? It's the goddess of winter." No one's gonna have a fucking clue what I'm talking about, unless they're really into this shit. But you know what people do notice? That little ambient hum, that little thing, when it's fucking screaming rain like this outside, and you
can't wait for spring. The little indicator in the environment that signals to us, "Don't worry, it's gonna be over soon, spring will come." It's not anything in nature, it's when the first Cadbury's cream eggs appear in shops.
As soon as you see cream eggs, then you know, ah, it's almost Easter. And then you think back to years before, and you think back to longer days and bits of sunlight. And you go, ah, Easter's coming, there's a cream egg. And then a couple of weeks later, the Easter eggs appear, and then you definitely know, spring is fucking coming, and then it's summer after that. And, and we have quite a strong visceral reaction to those signals. And it's not just cream eggs, you know what else? Back to school signs. You're in the shop in August and you see a back to school sign. Uniforms are for sale, copybooks are for sale, pencils are for sale. Summer is ending. You get a feeling in the pit of your belly, I'm a middle aged man.
And if I see a back to school sign, I feel like shit. I'm not going back to school, I can do what I want. I have a stronger emotional reaction to a back to school sign than I do seeing a leaf fall from a tree at the end of August. Halloween decorations. Stupid looking orange pumpkins, plastic things. Oh, it's gonna get dark. It's gonna, not, not winter yet, but Halloween decorations mean it's gonna get dark. Another one which doesn't exist anymore. When I was a kid, it used to be the smell of people burning coal, the smell of coal coming from people's chimneys. You knew that winter was coming, but that's gone now because no one's burning coal anymore. Christmas decorations, same shit. They keep inventing new ones now.
Pumpkin spice latte in Starbucks. We've become alienated from biodiversity, the environment, from the stories. And capitalism has stepped in with products. And that's what reminds our nervous system and our, and our unconscious mind that the seasons are turning. And you can't even rely upon them anymore. Just like the seasons are literally, they're quite different to how they were when I was a child, because we've got this extreme weather, like climate collapses unfolding before our very eyes. It's now getting to the point where you can't even rely upon the signifiers within the capitalist ecosystem.
Go into a pound shop, go into Dales or Poundland as it's known over in England, Scotland and Wales. They started setting Easter eggs as soon as Christmas was over. Any of the shops, any of the shops that are huge and they buy massive bulk buying from China. The range, going to the range now. It's shit for the summer, the barbecues are out and there's a storm outside. So under capitalism, in order for the different shops to compete with each other, they're not even respecting when it's Christmas, when it's Easter, when it's Halloween. And it's a real thing. It's happened after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the rise of neoliberalism.
Globalised supply chains and financialised retail. China, all of a sudden, opening up as the manufacturer for the entire world. Whether you live in Australia, Ireland, or America, or fucking, or the UK. We're all buying the same Halloween decorations because they all come from the same factories in China. You see, retail used to follow like local production cycles with storage limits and cultural calendars, like Halloween, Christmas, Easter. But since the nineties and you move towards this global logistics capitalism, the mass-produced goods depend on shipping from China. They're made quarterly in advance.
And the impact of that is, you walk into the range in August and the Christmas decorations are there and it strips Christmas of meaning. You know, that little kick in the bollocks that you get when you see Christmas decorations in August, when the Christmas section is done up and you feel like talking to the manager and saying, "It's fucking August, you prick." Don't stack the tins of Quality Street, 10 foot high, and sell them for a five or each. These things are supposed to be valuable. These Quality Street sweets are supposed to be so valuable that you hold on to the tin and keep knitting needles in them. You can't sell three for a tenner. Because my brain had grown up around a hybrid system. The hybrid system being?
Back to school sign, uh-oh. Then you look out the window of the shop and it's like, yeah, it's a little bit darker outside and those leaves are falling. Okay, makes sense now. They're fucking with that. Don't be showing me back to school signs in July and don't be showing me barbecues in the end of January. I'm waiting for the cream egg. Unless you walk into a Deals and they'll sell you cream eggs all year round. That's what our relationship with nature is like. I mean, the one thing we're left with is the dawn chorus. Don't fuck with the dawn chorus. When you hear those little birds start chirping at six in the morning, you know that it's coming into spring and they are trying to fuck with that.
A new startup came about this year called Reflect Orbital. You see solar panels. This is all fucked up. Solar panels don't work at night time, obviously, because the sun isn't there at night time. So this startup called Reflect Orbital are trying to launch satellites in, in, into the, into the air to reflect the sunlight onto solar panels at night time. And environmental groups are saying, you can't do that. We're supposed to have night time. You can't just reflect the sun and give us 24 hours of daylight. You'll fuck with the birds.
Bird populations would collapse because they won't know what time of day it is. So I have a guest on the podcast this week and we chat about all this type of stuff. My guest is called Dr. Martin Shaw, very interesting person. He's a writer and an academic. He specializes in mythology, folklore, storytelling. And I chatted with him a few months back when I was in the wonderful little city of Truro in Cornwall, which was a beautiful place, but one of the most stunning cathedrals I'd ever seen. Speaking of cathedrals, actually, I'm obsessed with Sheffield Cathedral, the main cathedral in Sheffield.
So you know, I've, I've a tour of England and Scotland and Wales coming up next October, October, uh, 2026.
And I didn't book a gig in Sheffield on this tour. And I was disappointed because I was like, fuck, I really wanted to go back to Sheffield. So what I've done is I'm after booking a standalone gig in Sheffield. This July, Sunday, the 5th of July at Sheffield City Hall. It's part of the Crossed Wires Podcast Festival. I'm gonna come back to Sheffield. The reason it's my obsession with the cathedral. So here's the thing, Sheffield is an industrial city. Very, very industrial city. There's a cathedral there that was built maybe 800 years ago.
But where the cathedral was, they found an Anglo-Saxon, early Christian Anglo-Saxon cross called the Sheffield Cross. It's in the British Museum now. But on this Anglo-Saxon cross, there's vines and leaves all over it. And I know the Anglo-Saxons, before they converted to Christianity, they used to worship trees and sacred groves. And sometimes they would build Christian churches on sites of a holy forest, a sacred forest, a sacred Anglo-Saxon forest. And I've got a hunch that Sheffield Cathedral is built on an old Anglo-Saxon sacred grove.
Because that 9th century or 8th century Anglo-Saxon Christian cross has got vines all over it. And then right beside the cathedral now, there's this weird little, it's called the Winter Garden. It's this really depressing giant greenhouse attached to the side of a hotel. And you walk inside it and there's just exotic trees from all around the British Empire in this. And there's mice running wild. Like English mice, just running around eating sandwiches, surrounded by trees from Australia. And there's a bang of 2002 off the whole thing. There's a smell of Millennium Dome off it. It feels like a glass perversion of an old Anglo-Saxon sacred grove.
Anyway, that's why I'm coming back to Sheffield. All right, July 5th, Sheffield City Hall. I can't get this shit out of my head. I want to speak to someone who's well versed in the pre-Christian mythology of Sheffield, even in the Anglo-Saxons. I want to speak to someone who might know about that cathedral and who could speak to me about my theory that it might have been an Anglo-Saxon grove. So if you know who that person is, please recommend them to me for that gig. And I'm looking forward to coming back to Sheffield. Anyway, without further ado, here is the chat that I had in Cornwall, in the beautiful city of Truro, with Dr Martin Shaw. And we speak about mythology, folklore,
English mythology, Welsh mythology, Carnish mythology, Christianity, Christian mythology. We have a cracking fucking chat and I hope you enjoy it. One of the things I wanted to do with this tour specifically is I speak, I have a lot of listeners who are from England, Scotland and Wales. And I speak about Irish myths frequently. Yeah. And I think we're quite lucky in Ireland in that we have, we've good access to our myths. We can go and read them. They were recorded, they were preserved. Not only our myths, our folklore. We've serious folklore collection. And in the 1930s, Eamonn Devillera, his wife,
she started a thing called the Schools Project, where every school kid in Ireland in the 1930s was told, go and find an old person, ask them their stories, write it down. And this was saved in the Schools Collection. There's 700,000 stories in there and I can go online. I can type in butterflies, I can type in anything and I will find the folklore of the land. And it's this wonderful resource that we have in Ireland. Over here, people don't seem to know much about their own folklore, their own mythology. It's even to celebrate is.
It's seen as frightening and scary and nationalistic, nationalistic.
Yeah, there would, there would be a fear of that. I mean, when I think about England, I suppose the two intact folkloric mythologies that spring to mind would be King Arthur and it'd be Robin Hood.
Are they Saxon or what are they?
They would be a blend, like most of these things are. The original Arthurian stories are now so old, the ones that you begin to get in the Mabinoggi on this book of ghost tales. They've got characters in it that are Bronze Age and a lot of the figures that surrounded Arthur in the early days are shape shifters. So they're animals. There's a character called Gawain and his name actually means Gwalchmey, the hawk of May. There's another fellow who was travelling around with Arthur. He was like a modern hipster. His beard was so long. When they were freezing to death, he'd just wrap his beard around Camelot and keep everybody warm during winter. These stories exist, but I had to go walkabout when I was about 25 because this issue for me was so real.
And so slurried and tragic in this country. I thought surely these stories are hiding in plain sight. They usually are. Maybe they live in the names of villages. Maybe if I went and sat on a hill for four years, something would happen. And the wonderful thing, there'll be people here that are old enough to remember the last century. And it was no sacrifice to leave screens behind them because we didn't have any. So I was able to just slip through the net just as we moved into the 21st century.
And when you speak about walkabout there.
Yeah.
Like I know that terminology from Aboriginal Australian people, so indigenous Australian people who are phenomenal because they have this unbroken oral tradition. Like I was over in, I was over in Australia talking to a fellow called Tyson Yunkaporta, you're aware of. And I was saying to Tyson that like in, in Ireland, we look to indigenous Australian people to try and figure out what our ancestors did before writing.
And what I mean by that is. Like people had big, long, gigantic stories and they weren't writing them down. So they had to remember them somehow. And one theory is that they were held within the landscape. And that's what Aboriginal Australian people do. And you went and had a crack at that here.
I did.
Tell us about that.
I did. Well, I would, I would have been about 25 and I met my first real human being, which was a Lakota Sioux medicine man called Wallace Blackelk. And he was a, he'd grown up on a reservation in South Dakota in the States. And he was a medicine man. He was a healer and he was towards the end of his life. And he was coming over, travelling from place to place, talking about a life of ceremony and story. And I realised that when, for example, there was a break in the weather that Wallace wasn't approving of, he used to aim his pipe at the clouds. And he would, for Wallace, consciousness was a contact sport. And so if he wanted the clouds to move, he would court them with language.
I had never seen anybody do anything like this. And so I came into storytelling because it was medicinal, because it actually changed reality around you. And so I had the option really with him. I probably, in a very ordinary way, I was not exceptional, but I probably could have hung around him for longer. Or he said, okay, I just spent four days and nights on a, on a small Welsh hill. And he said, you need to spend a year out in the bush for every day you did that. And so that's what I did. I went off for four years. In those days, do you remember the nineties, you could just disappear.
You'd nearly get arrested doing that now.
I know, I know.
But like the police would go, do you own this land? Are you a squatter? What's this?
Just listening to you then, wasn't that a thing that you just did? Wasn't that a thing? God almighty.
But even squats, like I know people in Ireland and they'd go to London and it's just, what did you do? What was the rent? There was no rent. We just squatted and everyone was fine.
But the point, the point I want to make about what you were just doing was the notion of failure. And I was talking to Tommy Tiernan about this and he was saying, how can you, how can you bear the audacity of claiming to be a storyteller with all the kind of clan weight that that would happen? Do you not feel like a fraud? And maybe it's ignorance or something, but somehow I've skipped, I've skipped that. Maybe the necessity of the times, things feel so dire, you've got to lean into the miraculous. But the point is, I wanted to say, is that after those four years in the tent, like any big experience, the only way I could talk about it was through stories. Everything else didn't have the weight, the heft.
What I find interesting too about your situation is, so in Ireland, because we do, we've got a strong storytelling tradition. We have the Shanakie tradition.
So to become a storyteller, you find a Shanakie and you learn the stories. And Shanakie means keeper of the old stories.
And to become a Shanakie, you don't like graduate, you don't decide. The community kind of decides after many years, that person is the Shanakie. But you have to do something like this in complete isolation and figure shit out for yourself.
Like you don't have, and I know you said, what was the name you gave me for a kind of Shanakie?
Yeah, well, it was, it's a friend of mine here, folklorist Lucy Cooper. She was telling me that round here, a storyteller could have been called a droll teller. Now, droll teller would be like a dream teller.
Wow.
So there's a connection between dream and myth and story. So in other words, you could say, I was asleep two hours ago in a hotel and I was dreaming like mad. And I thought, yeah, this is, this is my inner mythology playing itself out at high speed and unpleasantly. But a tribal, a clan mythology is when we've all been dreaming in a particular place, in a particular landscape, and somehow those dreams start to talk to each other.
The four years in a tent.
Did you know what you were doing?
No. Not really. No, I was trying to unpack what had happened on this Welsh hill.
Did things start revealing themselves?
Yes, they did. They did. They did. And it's the thing I said, I hope you caught it a few minutes ago, where sometimes in life, it doesn't have to be four years in a tent, it could be four years in a in a in a flat in Penrith, you know, you you go through something, you go through depression, you go through illness, you go through sickness, in some way you get discombobulated. And ironically, in the old bardic way of thinking about it, your soul wakes up. Your soul wakes up through duress, rather than unmitigated success. No pressure, no diamond. And so, yeah, things began to happen and I gradually became a storyteller. But I never would have, I I was intimidated by them because I didn't think I had the faculty for
language or poetic speech. And all these, do you remember all these garbled texts you get? Well, of course, to be a bard, you have to recite sixty thousand lines of verse and you have to have a stone on your belly and you have to live on top of Cro Patrick for three years. And it was all intimidating, but in a fairy tale, when you're trying to get from one place to another in a forest, you just get given little bits of plum cake. And I thought, okay, if I lower my expectations, I may get somewhere. So I learned tiny little fairy tales, half a page. Because what we have, all those fairy tale books, they are shorthand. They're like lawyer speak. That's not how people tell stories.
Are these like little English Victorian fairy tales?
No, no, Grims.
Okay, yeah.
Grims.
And that's Germanic?
Yeah, yeah, that would be that would be Germanic, but there is a lot of, you could say there's a nomadic agency in fairy tales. And what I mean by that is, in folk music, it's called vagrant stanzas. Stories and images move from place to place and you go, oh, it's this story again. Every now and then, you're going to find a story with a postcode. And that's what a storyteller really wants. You want a bend in the river, a particular tree. We talked, do you remember?
Oh, it's fucking gorgeous.
We talked about mnemonic triggers, where you walk through a landscape and the way you, and I can do this on Dartmoor, the way you have memorized the story comes to you by, you know, the curve of the tor and the bend in the river. It is a storied landscape. It's not an ink landscape. You didn't learn it that way. You learn it through that word walkabout.
And as mad as all that sounds, right? This is what people did when writing didn't exist.
For a longer time than we haven't. We've only had writing for a couple of thousand years. The people have been telling stories for, I mean, I was talking to a neuroscientist the other night, and he reckons that we're people like you and me, with our brains have been on this planet for a hundred thousand years. So they've been telling stories for a hundred thousand years. And writing is maybe four, five thousand years old.
Hmm.
You know? So this is what people did before the writing.
It is.
The landscape and which is, before we have a break for a pint and a piss, because we've gone over a little bit, um, my interest in mythology and folklore and the reason I speak about it so much, because people go, why is it relevant? For me, and this is my own little theory, I reckon mythology exists because we're animals. Humans are just fucking animals. We're part of nature, but we're, we have this extra agency where we can do what we want with nature. I think mythology and folklore exist in the human animal to keep us in line with systems of biodiversity. If we can follow the stories and have stories about the landscape and fear the river and
fear the mountain and respect this, then we will exist within an ecosystem that isn't extractive or exploitative. Do you get me? And that's what mythology is. And it's about the land as well. And the other thing too, it's as far from nationalistic as you can imagine, which is what I adore. So with Irish stories, like the river, the river in fucking Limerick, the Shannon, the Shannon River comes from the goddess Sinan. And you can, the story about this river is that you, you follow it all the way up to the top of Ireland and up there is the, the Shannon Pass, but we call this the, the Conla's Well, which was the well of wisdom, which was a little well that you, it had bubbles
from the other world with infinite inspiration. And one day at this well at the top of Ireland. A girl called Sinan, who was, she was a daughter of the god of the sea. But she was a poet and she wanted to write the best poetry in Ireland. And poets would go to these wells to get inspiration. So she goes to this well and instead of drinking from the water, she decides, I'm gonna dive in and I'm gonna swim to where those bubbles are coming up. I'm gonna swim. So she did and the other world got angry and said, fuck you, Sinan. And pushed her body away when she dived to the bottom and created this huge spout, sent her thousands of feet into the air. And then it overflowed and killed her and carried her dead body all the way down to
the Atlantic Ocean and Sinan became the River Shannon.
And that's a story about a river. Like, it's a beautiful story, but it's, as you said, it's about a river. It's about points in the landscape. But you don't fuck with a river when it's the goddess Sinan.
No. It's the difference between a river that is a goddess and a goddess of the river. If you know what I mean.
There you go.
You've moved into abstraction and then you start to curate a landscape rather than work with what's actually in it. So 2,000 years ago, you're making your way from one side of Ireland to the other or the west country of here and you would go deity to deity, not postcode to postcode. And you'd know the particular libations to leave, at particular bends in the river, particular sacred spaces. In all indigenous cultures, yes, everything is holy, but some places are holier than other places. In that wonderful story of Connor's well, what I love about it is that at the bottom of this well, there are salmon. You remember that? And the salmon are waiting for these hazelnuts to come down.
And over a lifetime of consuming the hazelnuts, which are filled, filled with the genius of story, the genius of crack, all kinds of spiritual dimensions. The back of the salmon take on these beautiful spots. And when you meet a real old fella, you meet a real Shanaki, you meet an old medicine woman, they are the salmon with the most beautiful array of spots. That's how you recognize them.
River spots on edge, wow.
Yeah, yeah, that's it.
That's gorgeous. And we have to have a little pint and a piss. Everyone has to have a pint and a piss. And we'll be back out in about 10 minutes, all right, Doug, bless.
Okay, let's have a little pause now. It's still raining. I think it's gonna be raining for the next two fucking weeks.
We could have a rain pause.
I quite enjoy this rain.
You know, and while we're listening to the beauty of that,
you're gonna hear some advertisements.
You're gonna hear some fucking ads for bullshit.
Welcome to 215 Maple Drive. We just put this property on the market.
Love the crown molding.
Oh, wait until you see the walk-in closets and the bathroom tile.
Does it have Verizon FiOS? You know, 100% fiber internet.
No FiOS, but it looks like it's got cable. Let's check out the kitchen.
No FiOS? Yeah, no thank you.
Don't you want to see the rest? Okay, bye-bye. Get Verizon FiOS, because when you're moving, it's 100% or nothing.
Cheers to fall savings at Whole Foods Market, home of higher ingredient standards. This Halloween, share chocolates and candies made without that spooky high-fructose corn syrup. Throwing a party? Make it easy with a berry chantilly cake. Ready-to-cook pizza? No antibiotics ever chicken wings. And sushi made fresh daily. Fall gatherings never tasted better. Save through November 3rd at Whole Foods Market.
Cheers to fall savings at Whole Foods Market, home of higher ingredient standards. This Halloween, share chocolates and candies made without that spooky high fructose corn syrup. Throwing a party? Make it easy with a Berry Chantilly Cake. Ready to cook pizza? No antibiotics ever Chicken Wings. And sushi made fresh daily. Fall gatherings never tasted better. Save through November 3rd at Whole Foods Market. Your call has been forwarded to an automatic voice message system.
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All right, that was the rain pause. Support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page, patreon.com/theblindbypodcast. If this podcast brings you mirth, merriment, distraction, entertainment, whatever the fuck has you listening to this podcast, please consider supporting it directly. This is how I earn a living. It's my full-time job. So I rent out this office. So I pay for all my equipment. I invest everything back into the podcast. I adore making this podcast. I truly, truly love it. And I don't want it to end. And we're eight years at it. And I want, I want, I want it to keep going until I'm bloody eagled by Limerick City Council.
All I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month. That's it. And if you can't afford that, don't worry about it. Listen for free. Because the person who's paying is paying for you to listen for free. Everybody gets the exact same podcast and I get to earn a living. Patreon.com/theblindbypodcast. Supporting this directly, it keeps the podcast independent. It means that advertisers don't have a say in... The thing is, I'm not even saying anything fucking controversial. It's just advertisers don't get to step in and make things boring. Support independent creators. If, if there's an artist and you're consuming their art regularly
and their art means something to you, try and support them directly. Because we're all up against AI now. And I don't think that AI is going to replace artists. The act of creating art is, it's uniquely human. But what AI will do is it'll flood the zone with shit. It will create cognitive fatigue and you won't be able to find artists anymore. So a lot of artists will just give up because they're swimming against the tide. So support the artist that you love directly. Now, I'm gonna fulfill my contractual obligations and announce a couple of gigs. This, this Saturday, I'm at the Spirit of Kildare Festival.
I'd say that's sold out the fuck. But I'm only mentioning it because that is one... Day before St Bridget's Day and I'm going to be speaking to Dr Neve Witcherly, who is an expert on St Bridget. She is fascinating and brilliant and she's an authority on St Bridget and Bridget's Day. February, Wednesday the 4th, Vicker Street. I'd say we could call that sold out, lads. I might announce, I might. I always hold back a few guest list tickets on the night and if I don't use them, I release them on the day, but you're talking about eight tickets. But there's a second Vicker Street. That's on in April, is it? And the fuck is that?
Second Vicker Street is on the 20th of April, right? So don't worry, I'm back in Vicker Street, even though that one in a couple of weeks is sold out. What have I got then? Belfast Waterfront Theatre. Yum yum. Let's go to Belfast. Recommend some guests for Belfast, please. I know it's, it'll be Science Week up there. So I might, I might have a scientist on, I'll see what the crack is. Galway on the 15th of February. Glamorous, glamorous leisure land. Glamorous leisure land. Any of these gigs that I'm calling out actually as well, recommend a guest. Give me a DM on Instagram, Blind by Ball Club. Recommend a guest to me for Galway. Inet Killarney there on fucking
the 28th of February. Come down to Killarney. March, I'm in Carlo. Is that nearly sold out? It's a small gig up in Carlo. I love the little small gigs. That's only 300 seats there. Up in Carlo, can't wait for a bit of Carlo. Cork Opera House at the Cork Podcast Festival on the 26th of March, then in April, where am I? I'm trying to fuck off to Spain for a week for some writing. April, I'm in Castle Blaney. Yes, please. On the 4th of April, then the 9th of April, University Concert Hall, Limerick, my home city. Giggin' just beside Yertys Couch, the spiritual home of this podcast. Um, not announced yet, but I will be coming to Berlin
in June. Right, not announced yet, but.
Get ready for for me coming back to Berlin. Gonna try and spend a bit longer there this time. July, of course, there on the fucking fifth. Sheffield at the Cross the Wires Festival in Sheffield City Hall. Come along to that now. And then let's move on to the England, Scotland and Wales tour in October twenty twenty six. Lot of this is setting out very quickly because I a lot of tickets were sold at Christmas. But nonetheless, starting on the eighteenth of October twenty six, I'm in Brighton, Cardiff, Coventry, Bristol, Guildford, London at the Barbican, can't wait for the fucking Barbican, Glasgow, Gateshead and finally Nottingham. Let's have a bit of Nottingham. I loved my time there the last time.
Back to my chat with the wonderful Dr Martin Shaw. Check out his website, drmartinsaw.com. Check out his books, his courses, his good crack. Also, there's a bit in this second half where some members of the audience shout out phrases and words in Carnish. Because I invited them to do so in the Carnish language. And the microphones didn't pick it up very well because these people were out in the audience and the microphones on stage, they're only designed to pick up myself and my guest. But some people in the audience offered some some words in Carnish and it was.
It was very, it felt very powerful to be present, but it it it felt very sad. It felt strange and sad when that happened because I picked up in the room.
A kind of shame or an uneasiness, it felt very colonized, which is a mad thing to say. Over in in what is technically England. In Ireland, we have great pride in the Irish language. And I know what it is to be in a room where people scream words in the Irish language and there's a collective sense of resistance.
And it just felt strange in the room. I'll tell you what it felt like. Some people roared out words in Carnish. There were some cheers and and there was silence. And the vibe I got was it felt like some of the audience were going, are we allowed to do that? As if it was dangerous. It felt like.
A people who collectively hadn't awoken to a sense of pride in the Cornish language. And it actually felt, it felt colonized. Maybe I'm completely wrong and I misread it, but I'm just contrasting that to knowing what it feels like to be in a room and there's Irish being spoken and the whole audience are like, fuck yeah, or even or Welsh. I mean, I've been in Wales and people start speaking Welsh and the first thing they talk about is the Welsh not, it was kids being punished in schools for speaking Welsh. So when you hear Welsh people speaking Welsh, they're, they're like, fuck yeah.
And I just have to, I noticed a kind of a shame in the room. If you are Cornish listening to this, engage with the fucking language if you can.
I've just been informed, they actually were selling my books outside, so apologies.
I want to ask just a really, really basic questions because something I don't have an answer to. And so in Ireland, the reason we know so much of our mythology is Christianity arrives in the fifth century. With Christianity, we have this new technology of writing. We get all these monasteries and monks decide we are going to write the stories of the land. And we're going to also have the Bible, but we're going to write down these stories. And we don't really know why. We can assume that these stories were very, very important. That's why they wrote them down.
But when you do actually read the original scriptures, you can tell that they're kind of going, here's a big, long story that I'm going to dedicate a lot of time to. However, it's a savage story and it's pagan. Do you know what I mean? And you can tell that they felt they had to do this because they were Christian, but there's too much respect gone into the retailing. So there's that little thing. Like, did that happen in England?
It didn't, because there's two different Christian traditions you're referring to at the same time. There's the Latin and there's the Egyptian. And the-
Oh, we had a bit of the Egyptian one, didn't we?
Yeah, you certainly did. Uh, so Christianity arrives in Ireland not with an invading force. It it it arrives on the tip of a tongue, not a spear. There is no martyrdom in early Irish Christianity. There's green martyrdom, which is the hermits, but there's not red. People are not getting slaughtered for this, so it arrives as an exercise in imagination. It doesn't arrive like that. Whereas the English tradition is different. It's an amazing, if you were wandering around Ireland, you would probably expect that on the crosses, you're going to see lots of Saint Patrick's. You're not, you're going to see Saint Anthony of the Desert. You're going to see this Desert Father tradition, this Desert Mother tradition,
that arrived around AD 300, AD 400. And it's a slightly different type of Christianity to the very Romanized, Latinized version that arrives in England. And the English monks were very quickly told, "Do not bring storytellers into the monastery. We want this stuff forgotten." But the Irish did not get the memo. Thank God.
I didn't know that, and I made a fucking documentary about it.
I know. I've seen it.
Why?
Because I know the Egyptian, it's Egyptian Coptic Christianity.
Why did we get that?
Uh, probably partially to do with tin.
Fuck off!
Yeah, yeah.
Go on!
Yeah, yeah, probably to do, well, here's the thing. It was when the Romans, as you well know, did not invade Ireland, because there was a rumor that once a year, everyone in Ireland became a wolf.
Was that the rumor? I thought it was because it was too cold and that's what they called it, Ibania.
It was the wolf, it just scared the shit out of them. They'd had enough of the British already, and so they don't come over. But there were already, um, warm trading relationships with parts of Ireland.
Iberian Peninsula and bits of North Africa too.
And so just another thing, while we're on the notion of a right Christianity arriving, it doesn't actually arrive just with this big magical book. It arrives in oral storytelling, and some of those biblical stories are really good. And like attracts like, deep attracts deep. And some of the old druidic sources of Ireland went, oh, we thought, we kind of recognized something in these stories in this. So let's get this straight. Your god is a storyteller. He's born a fugitive. He dies an outlaw. He has the fucking audacity
to come back. Bring it. And so this strange Galilee druid gets purchased in the Irish consciousness in a way that is very, very different to the way it proceeds in England a little bit later on. And there was something, you did talk about this, the Synod of Whitby, with the haircuts.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
The Irish were rocking a kind of mullet. It was a kind of mullet with a bald bit here, and it was all conversations about, but it wasn't really that. It was about all of this other stuff. So mercifully, I think, whatever was going on in those monastic temperaments in those scribes, I still think those stories are wild. And I think there's nutrition in them. And I think a talented storyteller knows, with storytelling, you have the matter of the story and the sense. Now, the matter is the A to B to C, but the sense is that wily genius that the teller in the moment, right here in Cornwall, brings in. And you
can still do that with those Irish stories. They just come back to life again. They reanimate.
Just about the Egyptian influence again, right?
Yep.
There's little weird things in Irish history that we can't explain. One of them is, there's a fort called Navan Fort. And in Navan Fort, this is 2000 years old, there's the skull of a monkey from Morocco. Do you know what I mean?
Yes, I do.
And then the biggest one, now there's no archaeological evidence for this, but we have a site in fucking Kerry called the Grave of Scotia. And Scotia was an Egyptian princess.
So in our mythology, an Egyptian princess came to Ireland and is buried there. So is that where we got that coptic thing? Is that what the?
Well, if you, here's the thing, in, in early, in early Ireland, the bishops don't have the sway that the abbots have.
Oh, yeah.
They don't have the same kind of sway because you're dealing with a country that has no, as you know, has no real towns in it. And the notion of a monastery is Druidic and it's bardic. And it made sense to Irish that they were like, well, of course you'd be doing this. And of course, round a monastic settlement, there's lots of jobs for other people. There's going to be people working in the fields, et cetera. So the, one of the reasons there was this crisis meeting up in Widbe was because they said the bishops, no one is, no one is referring to the Pope in Ireland. Now, to counter what, this is the academic in me coming out just for a second.
What I do not want to imply is that Irish Christianity was absolutely, completely different to Roman. It wasn't, but there's a flavour and you recognise the flavour in the sense that the early Irish Christians are so open to what you could call news of the universe. They love the cormorant, they love the heron, they love the strawberries. It's a praise-making culture.
And the little stories about like, I think it was Saint Kieran, some fella had his prayer book stolen by an otter.
Was that Saint Kieran?
Yeah, well, Saint Kieran has, he, I've got to tell this story.
Go on, yeah.
So Saint Kieran is this young shaman, this young shaman fella. And he, he's wandering along one day and he sees a hawk swooping down on a blackbird. And he does what he can do and his spirit leaves his body and ruminates with the hawk and says, you know, drop the bird, let the bird live. So he does this. So he's, he's in a monastic shape, but he's got this old bardic thump in him. Paddy, Patrick, steel eyed Patrick of the many conversions, that's what they used to call him. He gives him a bell, do you remember? And he says, the bell will ring when you found the place to do your set, you know, to, to build
your community. So I don't know about you, but I'd be hanging around Dingle or hanging around Dublin. Or, you know, and, and the bell, nothing. And then one day when he's in the most grisly bit of town, you know, when you're trying to muffle your phone, and he thinks it can't be here. It can't be here in the middle of the dismal woods. But as you know, with a lot of the early monastics in Ireland, their first communities, like King Arthur and the Round Table, are animal forms. So there is a, there's a boar, there's a bear, there's a wolf and your pal, there's the otter. And then there's the fox that steals one of his sandals.
That's it.
And goes off and leathers into the sandal. And he comes back and he says, come on, I want my sandal back. And, and the fox is so aggrieved, he goes on a vision quest and he fasts. And, and he has to come out and go, it's all right now. So these stories are ecological, funny, and they gossip across species and they're Christian.
Did you ever get into a fella called John Scoda's Irina?
Oh, of course, yeah.
He's fucking mad.
Yeah, he is. Do you know how he died?
Go on.
He was stabbed to death with little pens of his students.
He was behind the front of our five pound note back in Ireland.
Fuck off, was he?
They couldn't bear it anymore. Too much genius is too much to handle.
John Scoda's Irina, he, he, he was an eighth century Irish Christian monk philosopher and oh God, he invented what we now call ecology.
I mean, basically, everything we understand about ecosystem and nature and the interdependence of like, there's no such thing as any animal in isolation. Everything is part of this one flowing system. He wrote about all that in the eighth century, except instead of calling it nature, he called it God. And then he had that, he basically has like a theory of reality, which is.
God, it's like, it's...
The world is a video game designed by God, but there's no point trying to imagine what God could be because it's completely unknowable. In the same way that if you're playing Grand Theft Auto V and your character in Grand Theft Auto V, how can that character in Grand Theft Auto V imagine me with like a mug of tea that I've just spilled in my lap? They can't, it's impossible. And that was... But see, that's what John Scorsese or Regina did. Are you into Saint Augustine?
Of course, yeah.
I'm not into Saint... Saint Augustine dedicated his life trying to figure out whether to get boners in the Garden of Eden.
I know, but this is...
He did, he did, definitely did!
He did, he did, but, but, and this is, this is important. He said one thing, the reason I'm into him is one sentence. He said, "All truth is God's truth", and I found that a tremendous relief because he was not, there is, oh, all of these figures are strange figures of their time, but as someone that traffics in myth, and someone that tells stories for days and days at a time, that's what I see continually. But can you, you know, in, in my life, people are always trying to tell you about the one true myth, and there's no truth in the others, but there's, this is truth in one. But the notion that all truth and, you know, we all have different ideas of what God is and atheists and the rest of it,
but I found that a very beautiful freeing thing to hear.
And you became a Christian?
Like, what, six years ago?
Yeah, roughly.
How did that happen?
I wrote, irony of bloody ironies, I took myself out into a, a forest just over the border, and I went on a hundred and one day vigil. Hundred and one day vigil.
A vigil, what are you being vigilant about?
Uh, I was being, I was being vigilant. I was vigilant, well, I was almost fifty. That's what I was being, I was being fifty and...
Vigilant of mortality?
Of course, yeah, I was vigilant before, I have something called sleep apnea. So my body regularly tries to kill me while I'm asleep.
That's minus crack.
Yeah, minus crack. And so with that going on, with fifty going on and the rest of it, I thought it may be a moment, it may be a moment to take a few hours every day and just go and sit quietly in a, in a local forest. And you do that, and you get in touch with, you know, what they used to call the deep interior, the old Aboriginal folks. And that's what happened to me. And I'm not new to those experiences, because I've been circling around them for about thirty years. But yeah, that's, that's what happened. And to my extreme distress, the presence that announced itself was this, this Galilee Druid Jesus. Yeah. And I've
been living with the, if you ever want, people love you when you're looking for something. That's what I found in my early life, they hate it when you find anything. And so if you want to alienate and create tension in almost every relationship you've ever known, become a godbotherer.
How do you, because I can't imagine you as being a person who just cracks open a Bible and goes to church every Sunday. Do you know what I mean? Like?
I do.
And I'm, I'm fully, like, I'm, I don't know what the fuck I am, right? But I, what I always say about Christianity is, I love this as mythology. That's what I always say. And I, I never, if I'm looking at all types of mythology from around the world, I never say, there's this thing here called the Bible, but we don't look at that because they forced it on me in school. I go, no fucking way. Let's hear about this mythology here, this mythology that survived for thousands of years, that we're still talking about. But how do you navigate this thing called Christianity where there's a fucking cathedral down the road? And do you know what I mean? Do you know what's mad about Toronto, which I find very ironic? So the whole thing about, so the big cathedral, that's a Protestant one,
isn't it? Yeah. So the whole thing with Protestants is like, our churches are boring and shit. That's one of the, that's one of the things where Protestantism is like, the cathedrals were too beautiful. And when Protestantism came about, it's like, let's make it nice and simple, right? Your Protestant cathedral here is absolutely magnificent. It's beautiful, gorgeous. And then up by the roundabout that has the hedgehogs on it, right? The Catholic church. Have you seen the Catholic church there? Have you seen the Catholic church on the roundabout?
It's like a council flats cousin.
It's the fucking, it's this weird, fucking modernist square building with pebble dash vomit. And it just says Catholic Church on the side. It looks like a fake building.
It looks like it's trying to lure me in and I'm gonna get killed. And it's like, what the fuck are you doing here in Trover with that? You got it all wrong. That's supposed to be the Protestant church. Anyway, I'm not being sectarian, it's just something I'm noticing. I'm not into either of it. I'm not into, what am I, a Catholic? Oh, it's actually the ghost of a 3,000 year old carpenter, this bread. Sorry, I'm blaspheming.
I got, I got in awful trouble in Ireland for that. Oh, I was on the Late Late Show, it's this fucking talk show and it was on the national broadcaster and I referred to communion wafers as haunted bread. Which, because it is! Because it is! And then all the bishops in Ireland got their congregation, there was thousands of complaints, they brought RTÉ to court. But, I won. And now you're legally allowed on Irish television to refer to communion wafers as haunted bread. Because it fucking is though! It is, that's what it is!
Are you into communion wafers? Are you Protestant or Catholic?
I'm neither, I'm Eastern Orthodox.
Fuck off, you hipster! Tell me about that!
Well, it's, I'm not sure I want to at this particular moment.
Is East, is that Byzantine?
Go away!
It's very, very old.
Are there many of those left?
No, no, it's a tiny percentage of mainstream, you know, it's not mainstream.
Turkey?
Yeah, a little bit in Greece and some of Eastern Europe, you know, those places.
Eastern, and what is, so that's very, very old. So are we going back to when the Roman Empire, or when the Holy Roman Empire was split in two, and you had your Rome, and then you had the Byzantine?
Yeah, and then you're gonna get into something called the Great Schism, which is, and that's when Catholicism in its shape, most of us would recognise, happened. But for the first thousand years or so, Catholicism and Orthodoxy are kind of one. And then there was political debates between the two power centres. Those political debates also became deep religious questions, and that's what happened. Yeah.
And with Eastern, I'm guessing it's a bit more tolerant of the Christian mysticism?
It's entirely tolerant of the Christian mysticism. Now, it doesn't look like that from a distance. It looks terribly serious, and lots of men with beards like mine muttering things. But the reality, like everything, is once you get inside it, I needed a very strong flavour. Otherwise, I would have just created my own little à la carte Christianity very rapidly. And I would have just taken out all the bits that I didn't like. And I would have just felt, I would have had groovy feelings and danced around stones for the rest of my life, like I did for the first fifty fucking years.
And...
Just so you know.
So I'm guessing you're a big fan of the Desert Fathers, then?
To a degree, but I'm not mad for the asceticism. You know, I could do a bit of it. Here's a, the thing is, in life, you want, there's time for feasting and there's time for fasting. And we live in a feasting culture by and large. And I do think that there's a bit of wisdom in keeping an eye on that every now and then. And so some of that discipline, a contract with limit, for me, is important because my mode generally is excessive. William Blake, who always has great, you know, great postcards from hell. He always says, "You never know when you've had enough till you've had more than enough."
The horses of instruction, oh no, the tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.
You know, so uh.
What a mad country.
Totally.
That's so beautiful.
And, yeah, and on that note, if you want to really, if you want to dig in while you're here for the next few days, you're not going to get to the bottom of William Blake, I tell you that. That is a.
Oh, he's phenomenal, yeah.
Deep, deep fella. It's one thing to move around in other people's mythologies. It is quite another to dwell in your own. It's one thing to be flavouring on a meal, you know, to an existent mythology, but Blake, Blake would say that if you're going to have a direct Christian experience, you will know it because you come out with more freedom, more imagination and more reality. Now, I did not see that when I was growing up, but that, that's the kind of Blakeian world that is, I think, might chime. And he would be entirely with you. If you don't inhabit those stories as mythologies, they don't work. They don't work. It's just chapter and verse. You're paralysed.
You feel stiff, but you, you go into it and you take a breath and you just leather into those stories, just like you do a Bronze Age Cuculain myth, and the thing just will reanimate in front of you.
And when you say stories now in a Christian context, you, so you mean stories from the Bible?
Yeah, so there would be a story like, um, do you remember Joseph and his technicoloured dreamcoat?
Yeah, well, that's a, that's a shamanic story, uh, and it involves going to the underworld of Egypt, and I've spent thirty years telling underworld stories. So I am trained in a very different way to read any kind of story that's put in front of me, and I don't stew on it too long before I get it out into my jaw and start telling it, which upsets chapter and verse Christians, because they say, what on earth is happening? I'm beginning to feel something.
And, cause I, uh, I like, what I liked about reading about Christianity is the shit they'd never tell us in school, like, um, like when Christ was crucified, right? It's, we got told, okay, he's crucified, then, uh, he goes into the tomb and then he resurrects. And they didn't tell us about the harrowing of hell.
No.
They didn't tell us. Do you know what he doesn't assume? He fucks off down to hell with a stick and kicks the shit out of a lot of demons. But that's the harrowing of hell. We were never told that because it's too, it's too fantastic.
Yeah, it is fantastic. And what it is, it's underworld. It's underworld. And what happens in the orthodox tradition, we have a lot of time for Saturday on Easter. You've got Good Friday, which is not good at all. Then you've got Saturday, you've got Sunday. But in the meantime, we blow out all the candles in the church because it's darkness. Because the real work is happening down with Baba Yaga. It's happening down in the underworld. It's happening, there's stuff going on down there, dimensions of consciousness. There is a Paleolithic Christ at work at that moment. There's a fucking shaman on a wall with the face of an owl doing his stuff down in the world. The Donald Trump and all that prosperity, they know nothing about this stuff. It's too strange.
And, can we speak about prosperity here? I, I found myself accidentally in the presence of some prosperity theologians once.
Correctly.
I was having breakfast in a very depressing hotel, um, somewhere up England. And I'm sitting down and there's all these Americans beside me and they were praying about a business meeting. They were literally, I swear to fuck, they were holding hands and they were going, Lord, I hope this merger goes through. I'm serious. I hope this merger happens, I hope the acquisition, and I'm like, what the fuck is this? And it's like, that's prosperity theology. And it's this, like, the way I look at it is that there's prosperity theology, and then you have down in South America, you've got your liberation theology.
And it's prosperity theology is, how do we make very evil capitalism work within Christianity? And then you've got liberation theology, which is South American, which is how do we get socialism to work within Christianity? And Trump's network at the moment, they're prosperity theology. This is why when you see these giant Christian churches, and the pastor is clearly a fucking multimillionaire, and you go, hold on a second, I caught Christ kicked a lot of moneylenders out of a temple. So prosperity theology is, I am wealthy because God has given me this wealth, and therefore I'm good. And you're poor because you're wicked. Seriously?
I know.
You're not a fan of them, I'd say?
I would not be a fan of them. And it's so pathologically strange. It's as if no one's ever read the Gospels. No one has a clue about the Sermon on the Mount. This fucking thin-skinned, burning wheel of a character that Jesus actually is. No one came in contact with him and wasn't affected and troubled by it. He was not a barrel of laughs most of the time. There is a sense of humour there, but you have to dig for it. And then he's gonna do this supreme poetic event of the crucifixion. No one ever explained it to me like that. But it is the opposite. It is the direct opposite of everything that is now grotesquely playing itself out. So it's a killer. And of course, so, if someone
hears that you yourself are a Christian, they presume you have signed on for that level of malevolence and corruption that you just described.
And an interesting thing, if you look at the crucifixion historically, right? I found out this mad thing recently, so... How crucifixion came to be the method of execution? Because out of all the executions, it was by far the worst and it is about a spectacle. There was this hill, it was somewhere in fucking Rome. I can't remember the name of it right, but it was basically in Roman, it was about 200 years before the crucifixion, before Christ. There's this hill in Rome and it's like the Hollywood Hills. It's where the richest of the rich live.
Virgil's patron lived there.
It's where the world's first heated swimming pool was. I swear to fuck.
300 years before the birth of Christ, up in Rome, this hill full of the equivalent of Roman millionaires and they all live up there in their beautiful villas and it's like Hollywood and it's perfect. And this one fella, he was the poet Virgil's patron. He had the world's first heated swimming pool, right? But what they used to do at the bottom of this hill was to figure out, no one can rob up here because these people are the richest of the rich. So if anyone tries it, the punishment has to be very extreme. So crucifixion starts to develop at the bottom of this hill as the most terrifying, awful thing that you can do to the worst criminals. And it was about protecting the wealth of the wealthiest Romans with the first heated swimming pool.
And you can trace that then to the logic of why Christ was crucified.
It was, how do we humiliate this person? This isn't just execution. How do we give this person the execution of the lawliest criminal?
Yeah. And, and he, if, if you look at the gospels, there's Mark, you know, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. If you want the skinny on what happened, if you want the storyteller's gospel, read Mark, it was Nick Cave's favourite. That's what happens. But if you want to know why it happens, you read John. And John's gospel is the one that the Irish loved. That's the one that got real purchased because it's so massive and philosophical. But what you get in the gospel of John is Jesus's teaching methods changed dramatically in the final week of his life. The the parables of Jesus, those strange little koans that he uses. They are agricultural and they do with fishermen and he's talking to working class people.
But when he comes down into Jerusalem and he knows he has to start pushing meddler maniac type statements to push to know to do what he has to do, to cause what he has to happen. That's when he says very frightening things. He says before Abraham, I am. I am. Now, that's the kind of stuff that's going to get you killed. That's what's going to get you killed. And the the disciples themselves, people don't realize this, the disciples were a fucking youth club that were following him around. Most of them weren't even 25 years old. They are very young kids watching this thing playing itself out, barely with an idea of what's going to happen next.
The only person that knows what's going to happen next is the guy that's pushing all this along. But yeah, he he he texturally changes in that last week. He says the things that are going to require nothing but this to happen.
Before 2019, when you became a Christian, did you have any academic interest in Christianity? Were you drifting around these stories?
No, I was I was appalled by it.
You were what?
I was appalled by it. I I wasn't interested in it. I thought it was a husk of a thing. I I must say that I grew up in a Christian family. So my dad is a preacher. My brother's a pastor.
Your dad was a preacher?
Yeah, yeah, still.
What do you mean, what type of preacher?
He's a good, great preacher. He's a very funny, witty storyteller.
What's a pre- we don't have preachers in Ireland.
Okay, so this would be a guy that's not faced with the pressure of holding a parish together. But they're more of a stand and deliver kind of fella that turns up in different small chapels. This has got a Methodist country, little Methodist chapels around the West Country, and that's what I grew up with. I grew up with, language was.
Language really mattered when I was a kid. I grew up in a house with no telephone, no car and no TV. So all I've ever been around is a mum and dad that values.
Was that a choice or was that money?
Poverty.
Okay.
Yes, poverty. But but I'm careful with the word poverty because it sort of didn't feel like it. Because what we had to do was fill ourselves up with stories, which is, which is, I have a, I said to you in the break that storytellers need to protect their imagination these days. That you need to be careful, that you are not perpetually exposed to grinding levels of anxiety. Be careful with it, curate it. And I had those kind of limits put on me when I was a kid. I didn't want them to be put. I'd have lived in a cinema if I could. But anyway, the point of the matter is, yeah, I grew up with those stories, but then the nanosecond I could get out of church at seventeen, I was gone. I did not.
Why would I have needed to give it a second thought when I had the Iliad? Or Bear Wolf or or Fionna stories. I just thought there was no point in it. And then to my, it's too deep for me to talk about, but that's what happened.
But what what's it like now, right? So now you're a Christian, now you're doing your reading. You're applying the same passion to these stories, the Christian stories that you were, we'd say to Irish mythology.
Is it, what I'm trying to compare it to is, is, I grew up listening to David Bowie, right? When I was a tiny child, and then I didn't listen to David Bowie for ages. And then as an adult, I listened to David Bowie and it's like, oh, this is fucking amazing. But not only is it amazing, something deep in my childhood remembers this song and I don't know how I know it. Are you finding that now, reading Christianity and going, my fucking dad spoke about this?
And once that lake.
It's it's beautiful because it's like being reunited with lots of family relatives you'd forgot about. You'd forgotten what good crack they were. But interestingly, I don't remember the stories by them being written down. I remember pictures in books.
Ah.
I remember pictures in books. I remember a little lad called David throwing a taliv, you know, throwing something at at Goliath. And then, of course, when I reread the Old Testament, I realize the influence that it has on all sorts of mythologies and stories. And if you're interested in the story of Genesis, you've got to be interested in Sumerian myth as well.
Gilgamesh and all that crack.
So Enkidu Gilgamesh, all of these stories are talking to each other. Christianity is a very strange Middle Eastern mystery religion that somehow, inexplicably for me, has got purchased all over the place. And I was used to just having, it's an, it's the easiest target in the world, modern Christianity. If you've got half a mind, so I I just, it's it's irrelevant. The problem for me was one of your, a guy you would know, John Moriarty. John Moriarty was an Irish philosopher who died about thirteen, fourteen years ago, maybe longer.
And Moriarty had a great handling on mythology, but he kept referring him to himself as a singing Christian. What does he mean? Blake was a singing Christian. Blake died singing. And the thing I could not stand about John Moriarty, the pebble in my shoe, was the fact that he would give leverage and space to Jesus. I hated it. And then Lily Putt Press said, would you put together an anthology of John's work? And so I spent a winter, it was during lockdown, actually, writing these things down, doing the vigil in the forest and bit by bit in a kind of like a crab maneuver. Uh, something happened to me.
Can you tell me a bit about John Moriarty? Because so John Moriarty was, we called him like a bog philosopher. He, he, he like, I don't know anything about his work. People keep saying to me, like Mancon says, really Tommy Tiernan said it to me. You'll need to get into fucking John Moriarty. What's the crack with him?
John was a Kerry man. Uh, so in other words, Cornish in a fashion.
And he just had a, he had a mind as big as a prairie. And good conversation can be hard to find, whether you're living in a city or a rural area. And John carried the loneliness of his mind all the way through his life. He died at the end of his sixties. He was in a farming community, but had a beautiful father. And when he went to his dad and said, Dad, I don't want to inherit a farm. I want to go to university. His dad cycled into Listowel, you know, and got the money out of the bank. It's a beautiful story. And John educates himself through culture and history and develops this great big Moriarty in head. Becomes a philosopher and teacher in Canada, has contact with indigenous culture.
And then in the early seventies, returns to Kerry and says, how does all of this madness work? In the restrictions of my father's field?
How do I lean back into the kayak of my people with these stories? How do I, how is, how will barley grow on my tongue? From what I've been bequeathed with. And that was John Moriarty's life. Never earned a fucking penny. Never earned any money, never charged for anything. But, and that usually when a great thinker like that, when an old growth tree falls. They quickly are forgotten, but it's not the case with John. He's picking up traction in Ireland especially.
Yeah. If you could recommend one John Moriarty book for me to start with?
It would be my book.
For real?
Yeah, it's called A Hut at the Edge of the Village. And it situates John as a medicinal character. It's saying this guy's going to be good for your health and it's going to be a hell of a workout. However, putting that aside for a minute, the book you really, really want of John's is called Dream Time. It was a big influence on John O'Donoghue. Totally, totally. It's, it's not for the faint-hearted. John makes the presumption that you yourself are a bardic student in training. He's very generous with you. There are footnotes all over the place and I always say through a guy I know called James Hillman, footnotes are how you praise your ancestors.
Gary Snyder, the poet, always says, he says, for most of us, and this is, this is very relevant to tonight, books can be your grandparents. Books can be your grandparents. The poet Rumi says, if you haven't been fed, become bred. You can't fucking stop moaning. You sound like a child when you do that with such an adolescent culture. The West is meant to have such an extraordinary sense of itself, but you just do that and our self-esteem is very, very small. We know there is some enormous deficit. And I do think that myths and stories and the way we're talking about are something that's really missing.
Um, one thing I definitely want to chat about, right, is the Carnish language, right, as I understand it doesn't exist anymore.
Oh, no, it does.
Oh, it does? Oh, thank fuck. All right. I'm basing that on one episode of Deadwood.
Yeah, yeah, let's not do that.
Um, have you ever seen Deadwood?
Yes.
On HBO and, and like it's set in 1890 in Dakota and it's like a Western. And there's a scene in it where there's a lot of Carnish miners in Dakota and they got people speaking Irish. I was like, they have all these, these Carnish miners and they're speaking Carnish. And I'm going, they're not speaking, they're speaking fucking Irish. What's going on here? And then I went looking on the internet and it's like they couldn't find any Carnish speakers. They had to get Irish speakers. Um, like, I don't know, is it like, do people speak Carnish? Does it exist?
There's two. Who in the room? Fair play to you. Can you tell me a little bit about the Carnish language? I know fuck all. Or can you not talk about it because you're from Devon?
No, I almost can't. I almost, but I say that in a very respectful way. No, I think there have been times, and forgive me for anything I've got incorrectly, where it has been very, very, very diminished. But there's the beginning certainly of a revival. And, you know, if you travel up the road, as I know you were there a year ago, Wales, there's a lot of Welsh speakers. I think there will be a renaissance, but it is absolutely not extinct. There's a film, do you remember The Princess Bride? Do you remember that film? There's a moment in the film where someone says, "Being almost dead means you're a little bit alive." Like, it depends the way you look at it.
And I would see these kind of languages as, from a distance, they look like they're dead, but they're not. They just need to, you've just got to breathe on the ember. Keep breathing on it.
Because Truro, the town name, that's from an old Carnish. It means split, doesn't it? Three rivers. I almost have it. Oh, yeah, three! Because I did a podcast a few weeks back. You didn't hear my podcast about the Johnny Onion mendigee? So I did a podcast, I was telling you about this, is when you think of the stereotypical image of a French person, you think of stripy jumper, beret, and onions around the neck. And it's just this thing we grew up with, and you never question it and go, "What the fuck is that about?"
And the reason was is it's not French, it's people from Brittany. And in Brittany, there were these fellows called Onion Johnnies, right? So in Brittany, they used to grow these... Brittany is shit for growing vegetables, right? It's very rocky, but they used to grow these amazing pink onions, right? And this is like 1860 onwards. And the pink onions were so beautiful that when you sold them here, that people were willing to pay a lot of money for them, right? So, lads in Brittany who had fuck all money, who had the Breton jumper, which is the black and white stripes like Kurt Cobain, they would literally get their pink onions
and they would put them around their necks and fit them on a little boat and they'd grow across here to England and they would spend the summer going door to door, selling the onions around their necks and people would buy them because they're like, "These are better than English onions, these are amazing, these pink onions." But, they found a real affinity here because the Breton language was so similar to Carnish.
And that's... Do you have Johnny Onion Rings crisps? Yeah! Yeah, that's what it's from! But it's Britannic cunts who came here. Only like, it stopped in the 1930s because people figured out how to grow onions.
They still fucking come! Fuck off! Tell one of them I did a podcast about them, will you?
You sa... Alright, I can see it.
Someone say hello in Carnish.
Dog bless.
Fair fucking play to you.
Do Carnish people want to fuck off out of England? Yeah, I'd imagine there's a bit of that, yeah.
English people do too. I'd imagine so.
But it is an interesting thing, because what me and you were chatting about backstage, and it's also, I spoke about this to, you don't know Professor Carol Chin, do you?
I know the name.
So he's a fellow from, a brilliant fucking fellow from up in, near Birmingham, and I've had him on twice, just to educate me about the history of the English working class.
And he has an interesting way of looking at, he nearly views the English working class as a colonised people, and what he means by that is, the Normans came over and brought this structure of royalty, and he is like, why can't we connect with something pre-Norman? Something that's a bit Celtic, a bit Saxon, you know what I mean?
Yeah. Well, this brings us back to what was happening in the, you know, 1066, of course, and the Norman invasion, and this is a, I'm condensing something, but it's worth it. So what you get, the Norman courts in England, like everybody, they want storytelling, that's their crack, and interestingly, they don't go to the culture they've just defeated, which is the Saxons, they go into the Far West, and the storytellers that start to turn up in the Norman courts are Dumbnonian storytellers, they're Cornish and Devonian storytellers, and they start to tell the Normans stories of early elementary Arthurian tales, the kind of things you can find in the Mabinogion.
Now, these stories move down through the Norman courts into the area of people like Eleanor of Aquitaine, and what we now think of as the Arthurian romances is a cook-up, it's a combination dish of the best of these essential Celtic stories, but interestingly, mixed with a developing Chevalric tradition, which at its essence is Islamic.
It comes from the Pyrenees, Moorish Spain.
Where's that coming from? What's that doing here?
It's doing it here. Well, it didn't. It wasn't here. It comes from, you've got this, what we now call the south of France, you've got Moorish Spain.
If you were a Moorish diplomat, you had to be a trained poet. So it was inelegant to talk about politics if you didn't have a real capacity for poetry. So they come over the Pyrenees, they come into the courts and they bring a kind of poetry where it may be talking about a love affair between a man and a woman, but it seems as if some deep religious sense is caught in the poem. That is happening at exactly the same time as these Celtic stories of Arthur are coming down and the Chevalric tradition is cooked up between the beauty and the efficacy of what was happening in the Islamic courtly traditions and this great scrum of stories that were coming down
from our neck of the woods. And another thing, this is important, when do you think a myth dies? We get too fixated on the notion of, I want the pristine, original version that happened between AD 100 and 200. Myths do not work like that. People don't work like that. So in other words, the Arthurian tradition keeps changing, keeps evolving, keeps exfoliating and myths will be remembered if you remember that they are a contact sport. Then they're not a reenactment fair. They're meant to bump into the tragedies and the heartache of our own times. And on that note, if you want to come and study with me, I'm just over the border on Dartmoor. I have a school.
Yeah, you have a school of myths.
We've got a course beginning in September called The Singing Bone. And I, this notion that we are all swimming around, I mean, you've just demonstrated, swimming around irredeemably lost from our culture and our language and our stories. It's not the case, clearly not the case. So I run things where folks come and they learn the stories of the hedgerows. Another of thinking, that word shanniking.
What's a story of the hedgerow?
Well, the gossip of the hedgerow. Because to be a story... Storyteller, you don't want to get everything off Google. You want to go for a walk, you want to get dreamt by a lake or you want to walk on a hill and look at the thing and be quiet with it and figure out what would be 12 secret names for that cormorant that you saw, or 12 secret names for a hare, or 12 secret names for your wife that are complimentary.
And that sounds very meditative to me.
Yeah, yeah, of a sort, yeah.
And like, is there meditation involved in the myths and storytelling that you're talking about?
There is, but it is tacit, not explicit. So in other words, it's just something that happens. A story is a ritual enacted through language and a ritual is usually a story being acted through ceremony. I know that sounds a bit convoluted, but it's a real thing. So I tell stories for many days. I can tell stories for anything up to about five days, one long story.
And do you sleep in the middle?
Oh, yeah, there's sleep. There's usually, people fall in love, they've fallen out of love by the time I've finished, it takes so long.
It's their movement.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, so in other words, I would teach for about four hours in the morning and then we'd all go off and wander the woods and people sleep and go for swims and just generally come back to themselves. And then in the evening, we have a bit of a kaili and people get, you know, they get instruments out and do their wild thing.
And are you telling stories that have been told before or are you allowing the landscape to help you come up with the stories?
Not quite. It's that thing I said at the beginning of the evening with this good storytelling is the sense and the matter. So in other words, I learned a lot of stories from an old lady, a Sicilian storyteller. And she said to me, she said, the first hundred times after, you must tell this story exactly like I tell it. And then she says, but probably on telling number hundred and one, it's like a family recipe. And you're going to discover smoked paprika. And you're going to put a bit of paprika into the mix. And that's fine, because you have shown very big word in storytelling fidelity to the story. Stories do not appreciate being cut and pasted. They want you, they want to have their way with you.
I always say to my students, stop telling stories what they are. Stop auditioning them for your contemporary polemics. And the trouble is, YouTube's filled with mythology, but it's not. It's absolutely not. It's filled with commentary on mythology. No one's actually telling the stories. So the thing to do is, is let the story have its way with you, be troubled by it. And don't cut out the bits that you struggle with.
And when we speak about story there, the story to you mean not just words on a page, but an entire how you tell us, where you tell us. Like, do you know what I'm getting at?
Of course I do. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So story in a, almost like mycelium, it's, they're all connected. So when you read fairy tale books, you're often reading a story that belongs with half a dozen other stories. You've, the story is an orphan in Grims, but it needs its brothers and sisters to make sense of it. Mythologies are different. Mythologies have the brothers and sisters. Do you remember I was going to tell you something about Tolkien?
Can I say it now?
Tolkien had this thing, you know, and he said, he said, trouble with Celtic myth. He said, it's like a beautiful stained glass window, but someone's chucked a brick through. That's what he said. Now, and he said, there's an unreasoning to it. There's an unreasoning to it. But I have found personally, the very thing that he was trying to slag is part of its beauty for an artist. Because if you're dealing with pristine mythologies that have not changed for a thousand years, they're not mythologies anymore. They're moribund. You're dealing with a pelt, not an animal. And actually, when something is broken, when there's fresh air coming through it,
the job of an artist, the job of a poet, the job of a boat maker, the job of a dancer, the job of a herbalist is to get strange bits, put them together and see what happens.
That's mad that he said that. Was he saying that about Irish myth? Or just like Celtic myth?
Celtic in general. It's just a bit too vague for him. He liked four square stuff and he did amazing work with it, but he wasn't mad for it.
What I love about Irish myth is the madness of it. The fact that linear time doesn't exist. You've got this place called the other world. You know, you've got salmon that eat hazelnuts. You touch their skin and you get all the knowledge of the world.
I know. He called it unreasoning.
It is unreasonable, but that's...
No reasoning.
Unreasoning.
It's beautiful though. The unreasoning of Ireland.
Yeah, fair play to him.
I could fucking chat to you all night, Martin. But unfortunately, there's laws that say I can't.
We're 10 minutes over curfew. I want to say to everybody here in Cornwall, thank you so much for fucking listening to my bloody podcast. I didn't know there was anyone here listening to my podcast. This is a room full of transcendent endas and ten foot decklins.
Thank you so much for coming along. Dr Martin Shaw, thank you for being my guest. That was a wonderful, wonderful chat. Dog bless, go in peace.
I absolutely adored that night.
I just had to play the audience there at the end because it was such a wonderful night. And thank you to the people of Trover for coming out. I think that was a big gig. I think there was about 2,000 people.
Again, I didn't know I had fucking listeners down in Trover, but there you go. I hope to come back. It was an absolute pleasure.
I adored that chat. I listened to that chat about three or four times this week because I loved it so much and...
I don't know, putting out a live podcast too. Like, I'm busy at the moment with gigs. Putting out a live podcast is the closest thing I get to a little bit of rest, a bit of rest from my brain, a week of rest from the hot takes. But I will be back next week with a hot take. I don't know what it's going to be about, but that's the process. In the meantime,
turn your flick to a snail, wink at a cat, salute an earthworm. Dog bless.
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Love the crown moulding.
Does it have Verizon FiOS? You know, 100% fibre internet.
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